[ARSCLIST] Article in today's WSJ on Collecting 78s.

[Steve Ramm <Stevramm@xxxxxxx>]

Interesting article on the Leisure and Arts page of today's WSJ on the joy  
of listening to 78s. I thought it was generally well written and certainly 
helps  to increase awareness of the fun of collecting shellac.
 
For those who don't get the Journal, I've copied text below. Article has a  
graphic of a horn gramophone and 2 78 discs.
 
Steve



Waxing Nostalgic  About Early Recordings
 
By BARRYMORE LAURENCE SCHERER
January 18, 2005; Page D9
 
Recently, while looking through an old house for sale in our neighborhood,  I 
came upon a pile of 78s in the attic. (Note to those who regard even vinyl 
LPs  as antiques: 78 rpm shellac discs were the recording-industry standard 
before  1950.) I mentioned my interest to the owner, who was delighted that the 
records  would have a good home. They had been her grandmother's, and when I 
came by to  remove them, I discovered that the single pile was only the tip of 
the iceberg.  There were several hundred in all.
 
Bliss!
 
I grew up in the era of Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis. My family and friends  all 
played LPs and 45s on their "hi-fi" sets. But a different drummer set my  
musical gait. Not only was I drawn to classical music, but I preferred to listen  
to it on old 78s. My affinity had been seeded by a small parcel of old 
records  that had been my grandfather's. They were a motley assortment of 1920s 
dance  music, comic songs, some orchestral selections and opera records.
 
Two discs particularly fascinated me: Enrico Caruso singing "Rachel, Quand  
du Seigneur" from Hálevy's opera "La Juive" and John McCormack singing "Una  
Furtiva Lagrima" from Donizetti's "L'Elisir d'Amore." I loved everything about  
these relics: I loved the heft of these old discs in my hands; I loved the way 
 they sounded, not just the expressive power of the two tenor voices but also 
the  wheezy orchestras that accompanied them. I loved the way the big red 
Victor  Talking Machine label looked as it spun so fast on the turntable. (As a 
kid, I  used to wonder if the dog listening to his master's voice was getting 
dizzy.)  And I was mystified by the black, blank side of each disc, for until 
1923 Victor  red seals, the label's premium line, were all single-sided; only 
cheaper black  seals, and records by other labels were double-faced.
 
It wasn't until high school that I was able to indulge my passion for old  
music on old shellac at the Salvation Army depot on Manhattan's West 46th  
Street. There was a room in that blessed establishment piled high with 78s and  old 
books -- five cents a disc, 10 cents a volume. For $2 I could fill two  
shopping bags. I'd stuff one with the works of Lord Macaulay, broken sets of  
Bulwer-Lytton, leatherbound texts on practical surgery (whose colored engravings  
were just as horrifyingly detailed as any photograph). In the other I'd load 20 
 78s (as many as I could carry), everything from Franz Léhar conducting  
selections from his operettas to Sousa's Band playing his "Pathfinder of Panama"  
march and the Peerless Quartet singing "Will You Love Me in December as You Do 
 in May," with lyrics by New York's dapper future mayor, Jimmy Walker.
 
Soon I was hunting for the Holy Grail: a genuine spring-wound Victrola. I  
finally found a 1917 table model in a little antiques shop in Queens. The price  
was $8, and I carried it home in my arms by bus. Upon arriving with my new  
treasure, I raised the heavy mahogany lid, savoring the motor's characteristic  
aroma of lubricating oil. I wound it up, placed a carefully chosen record on 
the  green felt turntable, inserted a steel needle in the sound box, and felt 
my  heart nearly burst as the voices of Caruso, Marcella Sembrich, Antonio 
Scotti  and their colleagues melded together in my first experience of pure 
acoustical  reproduction, the "Lucia" Sextet.
 
Acoustical recording and playback fascinated me because of their sheer  
mechanical simplicity. Before the introduction of electrical recording with a  
microphone in 1925, the recording industry still used the basic method invented  
by Edison in 1877: You sang, spoke or played into a recording horn -- a large  
metal funnel -- which collected the sound and channeled it to a recording head 
 containing a micadiaphragm attached to a cutting stylus. The sound waves  
vibrated the diaphragm, which vibrated the stylus, which made a groove along the 
 surface of a revolving wax disc or, in Edison's case, a cylinder. The 
resulting  wax master was then used to create metal dies from which records were 
pressed.  Basically, the process is reversed for playback on a gramophone. No 
vacuum  tubes, no digital wizardry, no electronic amplification comes between you 
and  the original performers.
 
Play a well-preserved acoustical record on a well-preserved gramophone  (with 
a big external horn) or a Victrola (with the horn concealed inside the  
cabinet), and the sound usually surprises listeners because there's hardly any  
proverbial "scratchy" surface noise. That noise is only apparent when you play  
78s on an electrical pickup, which amplifies the scratch along with the  music.
 
This historical immediacy is especially telling when you consider that a  
number of major composers made 78 rpm records, among them Sir Edward Elgar,  
Richard Strauss and Sergei Rachmaninoff. Ruggiero Leoncavallo supervised the  
first complete recording of "Pagliacci" in 1907; four years earlier he had  
composed his famous song "Mattinata" especially to fit on a 10-inch disc, and  then 
accompanied Caruso's recording of it at the piano. And virtually all of  this 
historic material is available on CD.
 
More than mere nostalgia, 78s are valuable historic documents of the way  
music was performed a century ago. Old 78s have attuned my ear to  
early-20th-century performance practice, especially in the case of vocal style,  string and 
wind articulation, flexible tempo and phrasing that had been standard  when 
Brahms, Dvorak, Verdi and Puccini were actively composing. For instance,  
singers and string players used to slide between important notes of a phrase, an  
articulation called portamento that generally vanished by 1950. And thanks to  
the crystalline diction of early recording artists, vocal discs, especially  
comic songs and scenes by prominent actors and comedians like John Barrymore, Al 
 Jolson and Billy Murray, document subtle American accents that are no longer 
 spoken.
 
I maintained my interest in old 78s while pursuing the university and  
postgraduate degrees that led me from singing to musicology and finally to  
journalism. And even though I treasure the thousands of CDs I've collected as a  
critic and lecturer, my passion has never abated.
 
That trove of 78s I found in my neighborhood proved to be gold. Once I  began 
to sort through them (and to clean off half a century's accumulation of  
dust) I was astonished at the variety. There are several complete symphonies and  
operas, complete recordings of Gilbert & Sullivan, and an extraordinary  
wealth of dance music performed by Paul Whiteman and Duke Ellington. There are  
discs by Fanny Brice and Eddie Cantor (gallows humor on the stock market,  
recorded right after the crash in 1929: "Reserve a hotel room and the clerk  asks, 
'For sleeping or jumping?'"). There's Gershwin playing piano in his "An  
American in Paris," Carl Sandburg singing and strumming folk songs, and a  
lugubrious ditty called "William Jennings Bryan's Last Fight," praising his  old-time 
religion upon his death following the Scopes Monkey Trial. And there is  a true 
novelty, a "Message by His Excellency Benito Mussolini to the North  American 
People and the Italians of America." Recorded around 1929, in Italian,  it 
reveals him as having a surprisingly well-modulated voice, quite unlike the  
ranting of his Nazi ally to the north.
 
I admit that I don't often go hunting for such troves -- our house has only  
so much room to store them. But I'm one of the lucky ones, for my wife is not  
only patient with my obsession but over the years has come to understand it  
herself, just as, soon after we met, I came around to her enthusiasm for  
Wagner.
 
Mr. Scherer writes about classical music for the  Journal.